For a generation of musicians of nearly every genre, the laptop has become an instrument. It’s easy to take for granted, but the rise of the computer for music has been remarkable. Less than twenty years ago, real-time digital synthesis and audio processing was the domain of expensive, specialized workstations. Now, $700 per seat can […]

Novation has unveiled this week their own “free” step sequencer offering for Ableton Live. It’s some lovely work, with basic melodic pattern playback that comes alive once you add some envelopes. It’s a cool creation — but for me, it’s massively overshadowed by a new video featuring the upcoming Renoise 2.5 beta with the same […]

The remarkable thing about Processing on Android is that you can use your (desktop) sketchbook development environment as always, then run on the Google emulator or your device. Google’s open-source Android mobile platform runs on Java. Processing, the elegant coding language for visualization, art, and media, is built in Java. The marriage of the two, […]

7up 2.0 – Introduction from makingthenoise on Vimeo. What if the world of musical performance suddenly started moving a whole lot faster? That’s certainly the case among a handful of monome- and grid-wielding electronic artists. In an evolutionary breakthrough, what previously had appeared in a period of months is showing up in a period of […]

Yesterday, I talked about two complaints of music developers writing applications for the iPhone. These come from developers who are really iPhone fans, who just want to get their software released and (for many music devs) better categorized on Apple’s store. Pajamahouse Studios, maker of the new Sonorasaurus remix application, follow up with a more […]

A powerful DJ application for your iPhone or iPod touch may be a tantalizing prospect. But several would-be candidates aren’t available to you yet. Why? They’re languishing in Apple’s approval process, with no sign of whether they’ll be released or not. For all the success of Apple’s App Store, some developers and users continue to […]

A new, free software release for Novation’s Launchpad could make your device a lot more usable – and it shows how useful OSC can be for hardware, even if that isn’t OSC hardware. (Now, imagine what OSC-native hardware can do.) There are plenty of misunderstandings about OSC and the monome out there. Among them, there’s […]